MOSCOW: A court convicted five men of murdering Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Thursday, but the late politician’s allies said the investigation had been a cover-up and that the people who had ordered his killing remained at large.
Nemtsov, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, was murdered in 2015 as he walked across a bridge near the Kremlin after dining with his girlfriend. Aged 55, he had been working on a report examining Russia’s role in Ukraine. His killing sent a chill through opposition circles.
After more than eight months of hearings, a jury trial convicted five ethnic Chechen men of his murder, including the man prosecutors said pulled the trigger, Zaur Dadayev, a former soldier in Chechnya.
The court said the four others had acted as his accomplices and that the group had been promised a bounty of 15 million roubles ($253,889.59) for the high-profile assassination.
Nemtsov’s supporters gave a muted welcome to the verdict, but said Dadayev and the others were only low-level operatives. The case remained unsolved, they said, because those who had ordered, financed and organized the hit had not been caught.
“It’s the biggest crime of the century and yet they haven’t identified the real organizers or those who ordered it,” Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for the late politician’s daughter, told reporters after the verdict.
“The Russian government was not prepared to look into the entourage of (Chechen leader Ramzan) Kadyrov,” he said, despite his view that one of the masterminds was a close associate of the Chechen strongman.
Zhanna Nemtsova, the slain politician’s daughter, repeatedly said she wanted Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed head of Chechnya who calls himself “Putin’s footsoldier,” to be questioned about what he knew about the case. Kadyrov has praised the trigger man Dadayev as a “true patriot of Russia.”
Kadyrov, who has denied allegations he was personally involved, was never summoned by the court.
Nemtsova said she was disappointed but not surprised that her father’s murder case remained unsolved.
“Clearly, investigators and the court did not strive to establish the truth,” Nemtsova said in a statement on social media. “It was of course not a proper investigation, but only an imitation of one.”
BLAME GOES ‘STRAIGHT TO THE TOP’
The Kremlin, as it did when journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006, has downplayed Nemtsov’s significance, calling his killing a “provocation” designed to cause problems for the Russian authorities.
Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said after the verdict it was up to investigators to decide if further examination of the case was necessary.
Before the verdict, Peskov had said it was “an extraordinarily complex case” and that it sometimes took years to identify and arrest the masterminds in such cases.
Investigators have said they are still seeking a man they suspect of having helped organize the killing. Nemtsova said she saw no willingness on the authorities’ part to pursue the case.
Her father, a former deputy prime minister who was once tipped to succeed Boris Yeltsin as president, a job Putin got, had authored an excoriating report on Putin’s rule. Shortly before he was killed, he had been working on a report examining the Russian military’s role in Ukraine.
Kremlin critics say the trial was flawed. The authorities never made public any CCTV footage of the killing despite it taking place in sight of the Kremlin’s walls.
A murder weapon was never recovered, and many witnesses were never summoned. One of the main suspects was also killed — in unclear circumstances — when authorities tried to detain him in Chechnya.
Olga Mikhailova, a lawyer for Nemtsova, said during the trial that Nemtsov had been a major irritant to the authorities.
“We are absolutely convinced, considering how the murder was organized and carried out, that the roots of the killing go straight to top Russian and Chechen officials,” she said.
Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov’s one-time spokesman, said he and other supporters would now try to pressure the authorities into pursuing the people who were really behind the murder.
Nemtsov’s memory is kept alive in central Moscow where, for more than 700 days and nights, a small group of anti-Kremlin activists has guarded a makeshift memorial to him on the bridge opposite Moscow’s Red Square where he was gunned down.
The city authorities have dismantled the memorial several times, but each time activists have rebuilt it.
The five Chechen men will be sentenced by the court at a later date. A lawyer for at least one of them said he would appeal.
Nemtsova said she would not rest until the case was solved.
“We will fight on to find out the full truth using all means at our disposal,” she said.
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Allies of slain Putin critic Nemtsov allege cover-up after guilty verdict
Allies of slain Putin critic Nemtsov allege cover-up after guilty verdict
Italian fruit detective racing to save forgotten varieties
CITTA DI CASTELLO: Isabella Dalla Ragione hunts in abandoned gardens and orchards for forgotten fruits, preserving Italy’s agricultural heritage and saving varieties which could help farmers withstand the vagaries of a changing climate.
The 68-year-old’s collection of apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches and almonds, grown using methods of old, are more resilient to the climate shifts and extremes seen increasingly frequently in the southern Mediterranean.
The Italian agronomist-turned-detective seeks descriptions of bygone local fruits in centuries-old diaries or farming documents, and sets out to find them.
Others she identifies by matching them to fruits in Renaissance paintings, where they often appear in depictions of the Madonna and Child.
Of the 150 or so varieties collected from Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and Marche and grown by her non-profit Archaeologia Arborea foundation, the small, round Florentine pear is among Dalla Ragione’s favorites.
“I’d found it described in documents from the 1500s, but I’d never seen it and believed it lost,” she told AFP.
“Then 15 years ago, in the mountains between Umbria and Marche, I found a tree almost in the middle of the woods,” thanks to an elderly local woman who told her about it by chance.
While old varieties are flavoursome, most disappeared from markets and tables after the Second World War as Italy’s agricultural system modernized.
- ‘Urgent’ -
Italy is a large fruit producer. Its pear production ranks first in Europe and third globally, but just five modern varieties — none of which are Italian — account for over 80 percent of its output.
“There used to be hundreds, even thousands, of varieties because each region, each valley, each place had its own,” Dalla Ragione said as she showed off wicker baskets full of fruit, stored in a little church near the orchard.
Modern markets instead demand large crops of fruits that can be harvested quickly, easily stored and last a long time.
But as global warming makes for an increasingly challenging climate, experts say a broader range of plant genetic diversity is key.
“Heirloom varieties... are able to adapt to climate change, to more severe water shortages, to extremes of cold and heat,” said Mario Marino, from the climate change division of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
“However, a much more severe disease arrives, one that improved varieties are normally more resistant to... and the local varieties perish, or perhaps don’t produce fruit,” he told AFP.
The answer lies in creating new varieties by crossing modern and old-fashioned ones, he said.
Marino, who advises Dalla Ragione’s foundation, said her work was “urgent” because “preserving one’s heritage means preserving the land, preserving biodiversity... and (allowing) us to use that DNA for new genetic resources.”
- Oral testimonies -
Researchers can access the collection, while Dalla Ragione also recreates historical gardens which can host recovered varieties as part of an EU-funded project.
“We don’t do all this research and conservation work out of nostalgia, out of romanticism,” she said as she harvested pink apples from her trees in the hilly hamlet of San Lorenzo di Lerchi in Umbria.
“We do it because when we lose variety, we lose food security, we lose diversity and the system’s ability to respond to various changes, and we also lose a lot in cultural terms.”
Dalla Ragione has sought answers to fruit mysteries in monastery orchards, the gardens of nobility and common allotments. She has pored over local texts from the 16th and 17th centuries.
She once traced a pear to a village in southern Umbria after reading about it in the diary of a musical band director.
But one of her richest sources on how best to cultivate such varieties has been oral testimonies — and as the last generation of farmers that grew the crops die, much local knowledge is lost.
That has made it difficult to know how to divide her time between researching and looking for a new variety, though she has learnt the hard way that the urgency “is always to save it.”
“In the past if I’ve delayed, thinking ‘I’ll do it next year’, I’ve found the plant has since gone.”
The 68-year-old’s collection of apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches and almonds, grown using methods of old, are more resilient to the climate shifts and extremes seen increasingly frequently in the southern Mediterranean.
The Italian agronomist-turned-detective seeks descriptions of bygone local fruits in centuries-old diaries or farming documents, and sets out to find them.
Others she identifies by matching them to fruits in Renaissance paintings, where they often appear in depictions of the Madonna and Child.
Of the 150 or so varieties collected from Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and Marche and grown by her non-profit Archaeologia Arborea foundation, the small, round Florentine pear is among Dalla Ragione’s favorites.
“I’d found it described in documents from the 1500s, but I’d never seen it and believed it lost,” she told AFP.
“Then 15 years ago, in the mountains between Umbria and Marche, I found a tree almost in the middle of the woods,” thanks to an elderly local woman who told her about it by chance.
While old varieties are flavoursome, most disappeared from markets and tables after the Second World War as Italy’s agricultural system modernized.
- ‘Urgent’ -
Italy is a large fruit producer. Its pear production ranks first in Europe and third globally, but just five modern varieties — none of which are Italian — account for over 80 percent of its output.
“There used to be hundreds, even thousands, of varieties because each region, each valley, each place had its own,” Dalla Ragione said as she showed off wicker baskets full of fruit, stored in a little church near the orchard.
Modern markets instead demand large crops of fruits that can be harvested quickly, easily stored and last a long time.
But as global warming makes for an increasingly challenging climate, experts say a broader range of plant genetic diversity is key.
“Heirloom varieties... are able to adapt to climate change, to more severe water shortages, to extremes of cold and heat,” said Mario Marino, from the climate change division of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
“However, a much more severe disease arrives, one that improved varieties are normally more resistant to... and the local varieties perish, or perhaps don’t produce fruit,” he told AFP.
The answer lies in creating new varieties by crossing modern and old-fashioned ones, he said.
Marino, who advises Dalla Ragione’s foundation, said her work was “urgent” because “preserving one’s heritage means preserving the land, preserving biodiversity... and (allowing) us to use that DNA for new genetic resources.”
- Oral testimonies -
Researchers can access the collection, while Dalla Ragione also recreates historical gardens which can host recovered varieties as part of an EU-funded project.
“We don’t do all this research and conservation work out of nostalgia, out of romanticism,” she said as she harvested pink apples from her trees in the hilly hamlet of San Lorenzo di Lerchi in Umbria.
“We do it because when we lose variety, we lose food security, we lose diversity and the system’s ability to respond to various changes, and we also lose a lot in cultural terms.”
Dalla Ragione has sought answers to fruit mysteries in monastery orchards, the gardens of nobility and common allotments. She has pored over local texts from the 16th and 17th centuries.
She once traced a pear to a village in southern Umbria after reading about it in the diary of a musical band director.
But one of her richest sources on how best to cultivate such varieties has been oral testimonies — and as the last generation of farmers that grew the crops die, much local knowledge is lost.
That has made it difficult to know how to divide her time between researching and looking for a new variety, though she has learnt the hard way that the urgency “is always to save it.”
“In the past if I’ve delayed, thinking ‘I’ll do it next year’, I’ve found the plant has since gone.”
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